Search results

This study aims to dye silk with natural pigments extract of Coreopsis tinctoria, by treating the fabrics with appropriate mordant under suitable dyeing conditions, to achieve good dyeing depth, fastness and ultraviolet (UV) protection.

Firstly, single factor experiments were used to determine the basic dyeing conditions of Coreopsis tinctoria. The optimal process conditions for direct dyeing were determined through orthogonal experiments. After that, the dyeing with mordant was used. Based on the previously determined optimal process conditions, silk fabrics were dyed with different mordanting methods, with different mordants and mordant dosages. The dyeing results were compared, in terms of the K/S values of the dyed fabrics, to determine the most appropriate dyeing conditions with mordant.

The extract of Coreopsis tinctoria can dye silk fabrics satisfactorily. Good dyeing depth and fastness can be obtained by using suitable dyeing methods and dyeing conditions, especially when using the natural mordant pomegranate rind and the rare earth mordant neodymium oxide. The silk fabrics dyed with Coreopsis tinctoria have good UV resistance, which allows a desirable finishing effect to be achieved while dyeing, using a safe and environmentally friendly method.

The composition of Coreopsis tinctoria is complex, and the specific composition of colouring the silk fibre has not been determined. There are many factors that affect the dyeing experiment, which have an impact on the experimental results.

The results of this study may help expand the application of Coreopsis tinctoria beyond medicine.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first report on dyeing silk with the extract of Coreopsis tinctoria achieving good dyeing results. Its depth of staining and staining fastness were satisfactory. Optimum dyeing method and dyeing conditions have been identified. The fabric dyed with Coreopsis tinctoria has good UV protection effect, which is conducive to improving the application value of the dyeing fabric. The findings help offer a new direction for the application of medicinal plants in the eco-friendly dyeing of silk.

This study provides new insights into the relationship between the heterogeneity of institutional investors (IIs) and corporate tax avoidance (CTA). It also investigates whether family ownership moderates this relationship.

Based on a sample of 200 French-listed firms from 2008 to 2017, we use the generalized method of moment (GMM) estimator proposed by Arellano and Bover (1995) and developed by Blundell and Bond (1998) to address endogeneity and omitted variable concerns.

The results show that passive IIs are associated with an increase in the level of tax avoidance. However, active ones significantly decrease the levels of tax avoidance practices. Moreover, we show that institutional activism is not sufficient to control managerial actions, particularly in the context of controlled family businesses. The results suggest that families may expropriate the rights of minority shareholders through a controlling coalition with passive IIs.

This study has several practical implications. First, the results are useful for policymakers who should constrain passive IIs to provide only one service (asset management). Second, this study may sensitize family owners to the need to cooperate with active IIs that are effective in monitoring the firm. In particular, families should be willing to sacrifice some of their socioemotional wealth to promote a balanced ownership structure, which is important for responsible and effective corporate governance.

This paper extends previous research by investigating the heterogeneity of IIs in terms of horizon, ownership and control. In addition, this paper sheds a new light on how family firms behave regarding tax avoidance practices in the presence of active and passive IIs.

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between leader bottom-line mentality (BLM) and employee innovative behavior, which may be interpreted by employees’ perceived creativity expectations and moderated by employee time orientation.

A multi-wave and multi-source questionnaire survey with 259 paired Chinese employee–leader dyads provided data to test the theoretical model. Hypotheses were tested with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

Consistent with hypotheses, leader BLM reduces employees’ perceived creativity expectations and thus inhibits employees’ innovative behavior, and this effect is stronger for employees with short-term orientation.

Our findings highlight the negative influences of leader BLM on innovative behavior and the buffering role of employees’ long-term orientation. Organizations may incorporate BLM in leadership promotion and evaluation and provide corresponding training for leaders to overcome BLM. In addition, long-term orientation can be a valuable indicator in employee recruitment and selection.

This study contributes to a new theoretical perspective of the Pygmalion effects for understanding leader BLM’s influence on employee innovative behavior.

The purpose of the this study is to discover the impact of practices of knowledge management, intellectual property protection and management innovation on entrepreneurial leadership, which in turn leads to sustainable growth in small and medium-sized enterprises.

The data was collected from 292 small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in the USA using a cross-sectional survey. To evaluate the study hypotheses and analyse the data, structural equation modelling was used. SMART-PLS software was used for both confirmatory factor analysis and structural analysis.

The work has significantly contributed in revealing that knowledge management practices, management innovation and intellectual property protection have a substantial and constructive impact on entrepreneurial leadership, which in turn leads to sustainable growth in SMEs.

The study findings recommend that SMEs must focus on knowledge management practices, intellectual property protection and management innovation to nurture entrepreneurial leadership, which can lead to sustainable growth. SMEs can benefit from investing in knowledge management practices, protecting their intellectual property and innovating their management practices to achieve sustainable growth. Also, the absorptive capacity of an SME can help it to aggravate the impact of the above factors and lead them to sustainable growth faster.

The current work studies the association between knowledge management practices, intellectual property protection, management innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and sustainable growth in SMEs, thus contributing to the literature. The study provides insights into the factors that can nurture entrepreneurial leadership and contribute to sustainable growth in SMEs, which can inform policy and practice in the field of entrepreneurship.

Although the role of returnees is critical to firm innovation, the literature offers inconsistent findings regarding returnees' effect on firms' innovation performance. To reconcile this issue, the authors argue that taking the types of innovation into account – i.e. technical innovation and commercial innovation – is necessary. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine how firms led by returnees affect the relationship between research and development (R&D) input and above two types of innovation output, as well as the contingent role of political connections (PCs) and venture capital funding (VC funding).

This study empirically tested the hypotheses using a dataset of 54,617 firm-year observations for 18,475 Chinese firms in Zhongguancun Science Park (ZSP) from 2009 to 2014.

The results show that the positive effect of R&D input on technical innovation performance (TIP) is reinforced when firms are led by returnees, while the positive effect of R&D input on commercial innovation performance (CIP) is weakened when firms are led by returnees compared with those firms led by the local counterparts. The findings further show that returnee firms' positive effect on the relationship between R&D input and technical innovation performance is more salient for firms with more PCs but weakened for those with more VC funding.

This study enriches the research on returnee firms' advantages and disadvantages in transforming R&D input into innovation performance, and the findings highlight that firms led by returnees can increase R&D efficiency of technical innovation, but reduce R&D efficiency of commercial innovation. Moreover, this study offers a contingent view of political and economic stakeholders' roles in returnee firms' innovation, by revealing PCs help returnee firms to enhance R&D efficiency in technological innovation, while venture capital can hamper such R&D efficiency.

This paper identifies the most significant eco-friendly smart home technology (eco-SHT) adoption drivers and barriers for investors. Findings highlight potential investor approaches to overcome these adoption barriers within the stages of the innovation-decision process (IDP), helping to increase investments towards eco-SHTs, ultimately fostering sustainability.

With 42 interviews, the studies’ qualitative research design entails two in-depth semi-structured interview rounds. While integrating the IDP, the first set of interviews identify the most common investor adoption drivers and barriers regarding eco-SHTs. The second interview round fixates on potential approaches to overcome the identified barriers.

Regulatory and ideological factors, financial considerations, market dynamics and demand, user aspects and technology and integration are the main eco-SHT adoption drivers and barriers from an investor perspective. Approaches to overcome these obstacles entail educative and awareness initiatives, refined financial planning and incentives, strategic market positioning and partnerships, user-centric designs and feedback and improved technological integration and support.

By extending beyond traditional analyses of supply-demand dynamics, costs and returns, this research examines eco-SHTs from an investor’s perspective, while strategically investigating the key drivers, barriers and methods to address these challenges. The study incorporates multidimensional factors other than typical investor concerns, offering a comprehensive, multidisciplinary perspective. It covers all IDP stages, constructing a matrix of drivers, obstacles and supporting strategies to advance sustainability within the real estate sector.

This paper aims to investigate the role-play of Protean Career Attitude (PCA) and Career Success (CS) in Affective Organizational Commitment (AOC).

A cross-sectional study on 376 employees from 55 hotels in Malaysia were conducted. The co-variance-based structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data to test the direct and indirect relationships of PCA and CS with AOC.

The findings reveal that self-directed career attitude (SDCA) has a positive direct influence on AOC as well as indirect influence through the mediation of OCS and SCS. However, the value-driven career attitude (VDCA) neither influences AOC nor the OCS.

This is a first paper to body of knowledge in Asian context which identify mediating role of career success (SCA and OCS) to PCA and AOC. The findings of this research are the workplace learning in hospitality management. The authors argue that hotels should not assume spontaneously PCA with diminishing AOC, but rather hotels' attention is required to identify the most important preferences of these butterfly career attitudes such as OCS and SCS. Most importantly the research negates many negative labels of PCA and adds new perception to the contemporary career literature. Higher education institutions, government, and primary, secondary, and post-secondary education departments can play a significant role in developing PCA dispositions like SDCA and VDCA toward career success. Therefore, further study should examine PCA and their relevance to career outcome like job searching and employability of students in Malaysia. The paper is the first, to one's knowledge, to assess organizational commitment with specific measures of PCA. While the results are simple, they refute many stereotypes of the new career and, in that sense, add an important perspective to the career literature.

Cambodia's sustained and robust growth performance since the post-reform era in 1993 has been attributed to the boom in inward foreign direct investment (FDI) attracted to the country's labor-intensive industries, where it has comparative advantages. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it aims to assess the consistency between Cambodia's revealed comparative advantage in exports and its sectoral inward FDI. Second, it examines the relationship between industry-level FDI and growth performance by accounting for heterogeneity across industries.

The paper uses descriptive methods and an industry-level dataset provided by the Council for the Development of Cambodia to elucidate the issue. Additionally, it applies instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV-2SLS) regression to investigate the impact of industry-specific FDI on economic growth from 1994 to 2017, which also aims to address the endogeneity issue.

On the one hand, our research finds that Cambodia's FDI has been attracted to sectors in which it has a comparative advantage during the aforementioned period. On the other hand, both FDI and the comparative advantage index significantly impact economic growth in Cambodia. The greater the flow of foreign investment into sectors with comparative advantage, the stronger the impetus for growth.

This study fills a gap in the literature and contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between FDI and economic growth in Cambodia. It is the first paper to investigate the heterogeneity of industry-specific FDI and provides practical recommendations for policymakers to effectively harness foreign investments and avoid malign FDI inflows.

This study aims to propose a moderated mediation model to investigate the moderating effects of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance on the relationship between inefficient investment and firm performance and the mediating effect of firms that participate in institutional research on the relationship between investment efficiency and performance. This study also analyses the heterogeneity of the corporate nature, intensity of industrial research and development (R&D), industrial competition and regional marketization.

This study uses a panel data fixed-effects model to conduct a regression analysis of 1,918 Chinese listed firms from 2016 to 2020. A Fisher’s permutation test is used to examine the differences between state-owned and nonstate-owned firms.

Inefficient investment negatively impacts corporate performance and higher ESG performance exacerbates this effect by attracting more institutional research which reveals more problems. State-owned enterprises perform significantly better than nonstate-owned enterprises in terms of ESG transformation. Industrial R&D intensity, competition and regional marketization also mitigate the negative effects of inefficient investment on corporate performance.

This study suggests that companies should consider inefficient investments that arise from agency issues in corporate ESG transformation. In addition, state-owned enterprises in ESG transformation should take the lead to achieve sustainable development more efficiently. China should balance regional marketization, encourage enterprises to increase R&D intensity, reduce industry concentration, encourage healthy competition and prevent market monopolies.

This study combines the agency and stakeholder theories to reveal how inefficient investments that arise from agency issues inhibit value creation in ESG initiatives.

Companies seek to increase the percentage of acquisitions in different parts of the world by expanding operations. Many companies are adopting strategic mergers to expand their influence. However, most strategic change programs fail to achieve their objectives. This study aims to investigate employees’ reactions after strategic mergers through the mediating role of the employees’ psychological context. It was necessary to identify the most prominent postmerger employees’ behaviors. The study addressed this gap by investigating the outcomes of strategic mergers.

Data for this study were collected from 30 family businesses. Accordingly, 341 questionnaires were collected with an overall response rate of 64%. The structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach and the nonlinear relationships approach were adopted by implementing artificial neural network (ANN) analysis.

The results confirm that there is a clear impact of strategic mergers on employees’ postmerger behavior because of the change at the hierarchical level and the process of distributing roles. Employees’ psychological context (individual incentives, anxiety and individual mobbing) mediates the relationship between strategic mergers and postmerger employees’ behavior. In addition, individual incentives are considered the main contributor to retaining or not retaining employees in family businesses after strategic merger.

Policymakers in organizations must pay attention to employees’ possible reactions to the internal and external policies of the organization by increasing individual incentives and reducing individual mobbing toward strategic merger. This study has theoretical implications that are critical guidelines for academics in mitigating the negative consequences for employees’ postmerger behavior. This study captured linear and nonlinear relationships to discover the determinants and antecedents of a strategic merger in family businesses. However, future studies should focus on using more robust statistical methods by adopting decision-making methods to determine the best and worst companies in terms of adopting strategic mergers.

The scarcity of literature on the most important determinants of postmerger employees’ behavior is considered an encouragement to conduct the current study. To this end, this study enriches the ongoing and future literature by examining the most important factors influencing the strategic merger of family businesses. Family businesses have changed the economic landscape of many countries. The investigation of the strategic merger of these companies is considered a worthy matter of study to improve the nation’s economy.